Sarangan, Indonesia, 2014
Hot magma from the earth’s core forces Mount Lawu perpetually higher into the Javan skyline. Joko winds his white van up the slope of its base, lime-green rice terraces flanking the road. As we move from sea level into the sky, the thick heat dissipates into expansive, cooler air. We’ve been sweating for days in the city’s humidity, and I understand why my father’s family vacationed here in his youth. It’s a welcome respite. Joko has promised to take us to an old colonial hotel overlooking the lake, the same hotel where my father’s family took their meals when he was a child. We’ve all been looking forward to this stop as a highlight of the trip. My father recalls childhood days of swimming, rowing on the lake, family walks.
“Black panthers here,” says Joko, waving his hand toward the dense foliage.
“Really?” I ask, scanning the tops of the trees for yellow eyes. But a Google search reveals the critically endangered status of the animal. A relic of an era long past. As is their historical nature, humans have hunted them and taken their habitat for themselves. It’s not likely that many people will see a wild black panther on Java before these animals are declared extinct. Still, my eyes flit from branch to branch as we pass the forest. I continue to look for something I know isn’t there.
The hotel, much hyped by Joko on the drive as a colonial beauty, is utterly depressing to me. It immediately becomes clear that it hasn’t been maintained at all. Joko pulls up and greets the owners warmly. They smile and clap their hands to one another’s shoulders, offer one another cigarettes. Joko leaves us in the lobby and vanishes into the night to visit friends in the village; he will reemerge in the morning as he usually does. The grand salon, once the center of colonial social life in this area, is vast and empty, with cracked and torn mismatched couches, folding card tables with plastic patio chairs in the dining area. I imagine it as it once must have been, upscale and filled with people eating at teak tables, a chandelier overhead perhaps, a piano in the corner, then almost immediately I feel ashamed of my romanticization of the colonial era. The owners of this hotel don’t have the money to replicate such opulence. I’m being a snob. But then my sense of aesthetics is again triggered and I lament that the good bones of the building are being neglected. I flop onto a couch in the cavernous lobby, irritated with battling internal voices, all of which feel patronizing and ugly, no matter what side they argue. Ugh. I’m a colonist. The only other guests in the hotel appear to be a French couple holding their cell phones in the air on the couch opposite, who immediately tell me there is no hot water and the Wi-Fi doesn’t work. “Forget it. No signal in this place,” says the man, standing and walking to different positions in the room with his phone outstretched before him. I get the key and walk to my room. A gray industrial rug repaired with duct tape at its frayed edges covers a cracked tile floor. There is no shower curtain in my bathroom, and the mirror has a crack down the middle. Stop judging. Good bones. I step out onto the veranda, which looks down over the lake. That’s nice. I imagine that in the summer, families sat on these verandas drinking coffee and reading the paper. My parents emerge from their adjacent room and we decide to walk down to the lake, since that’s what we are here for.
When he sees the lake, my father’s face reveals a disappointment that gnaws at my conscience. My father misses the country of his youth. This is not a condition unique to him, certainly, but I have brought him here on a journey of nostalgia. Now his memories are being overwritten as he sees firsthand that the Indonesia he once called home, that he still thinks of as a fixed part of his identity, no longer exists. This is true for anyone who returns to a place they call home decades later, but there are many more layers to my father’s experience, layers that include being raised in a colonial system and ultimately ejected by force from the only home he knew, from a country of people who considered him and his family intruders. Colonial Indonesia doesn’t exist anymore, and there is no going back for people like my father. As his aunt Jo, interned in a camp near Jakarta during the war, wrote bluntly in a letter to her sister during the Indonesian War of Independence, before their repatriation to the Netherlands, “Pep wrote that you are disillusioned … I keep thinking about that. Had you expected gratitude from the Indonesians?… An uncomplicated, easy life like we had in the past here we won’t have again, but that’s not what you meant, is it, that you had expected that and now no longer expect it?” I think the war for independence shocked many of the Dutch in Indonesia. The loss was not only of their home but also of their illusion of harmony.
Along the lakefront, where once there was only sand and grass, dozens of vendors now line the concrete shore, appealing to us as we walk. Costume jewelry, T-shirts, ball caps, bubble gum, yo-yos, pork rinds are on offer. Good price. There is a photo of my grandfather in a rowboat on this lake during the 1930s. He wears a conical thatched paddy hat, Bermuda shorts, and shoes with dress socks pulled up over his calves. He smiles broadly. My father and his siblings hang off the sides of the boat, likewise grinning. It’s the “before” photo of my father’s World War II. I don’t see this carefree joy on their faces in any postwar photos.
Sarangan Lake is supposed to be the highlight of our trip. But as we sit at the card tables in the dining hall of the hotel that evening, eating a pile of underseasoned bami, it just feels entirely depressing. I question everything about this trip and feel a mixture of grief over the loss of something I never got to see, confusion about the scars of colonialism that run as an undercurrent during our entire trip, and guilt for thinking that returning to the sites of his childhood would be an amazing experience for my father rather than highlight his lack of home. When I read my father’s travel notes later, however, I find the neutral tone remarkable, the disappointment I had seen on his face at the lake completely absent from his account. “We arrived at the hotel, which has a beautiful veranda that looks out over the lake,” he wrote. “However, this former superior hotel appeared somewhat poorly maintained since its heyday, and we decided not to stay there longer than for one night. The next morning we left for nearby Madiun, where Mieke reserved two nights at the modern Colton Hotel.” I’m consistently awed by my father’s persistence in looking forward and not dwelling on circumstances. While I’ve inherited several of my father’s characteristics, this forward-thinking agathism is a trait I haven’t mastered. I dwell. I marinate in pain and try to understand it better. My father gets on with living in the present, and perhaps this is something one learns directly only through life-or-death survival, through actually having weathered a traumatic experience firsthand and putting it behind you.
Madiun, Dutch East Indies, 1938–1941
In 1938, Sjeffie is seven years old. His father works in the hospital on the Van Ingenluyfflaan, the broad road where the family’s house stands at number 49, surrounded by a shaded garden with tropical flowers and mango trees. Papa runs the hospital with Dr. Sajidiman, the Indonesian doctor with the tall walled villa at the end of the road. Sjeffie plays with Dr. Sajidiman’s boys, Dermawan and Suwarno. He loves to stand in the aviary in their garden, watching colorful birds flit from branch to branch while the parrots squawk and crack nuts with their black curved beaks. Sjeffie gets along well with Suwarno but less well with Dermawan. After playing in the garden until they are sticky with grime, the boys are told by Mrs. Sajidiman to wash up for supper, and they pour cool water from the basin over their hands with the pitcher in the mandi kamer, the tiled washroom. They scrub under their armpits with washcloths. Dermawan enters the mandi room with a grin and his hands behind his back. “Sjeffie!” he calls out. Sjeffie turns, and as he does so, a brown missile is propelled at his bare chest. It bounces off him and falls to the floor. A turd. Dermawan laughs hysterically and runs from the mandi. Repulsed, Sjeffie scrubs at his chest with soap and water and holds back his tears. “You’ll be in trouble with Father!” Suwarno yells after Dermawan. Sjeffie towels off and sniffs. “I’m going home,” he says, swallowing hard. “So go home, totok!” Dermawan yells. Totok. White boy.
Sjeffie is excited to start “real” school again in Madiun. Time to learn big-boy things. In the fall, he enters second grade, where he will get to practice writing and learn the way that numbers stack up and order the world around him, a thing he will love religiously for the rest of his life. An ayam lays one egg per day. How many eggs does it lay in a week if there are seven days in one week? There are twenty mangas on a manga tree. If you pick two mangas every day, how many days until the tree has no more mangas? This math is a beautiful thing underlying everything. The school is only a couple of blocks from his house, and he is allowed to ride his bicycle there. Like every proper Dutch child, he has mastered the art of cycling by the age of five, and now he pedals his little legs, still rounded with baby fat, to and from the First Government School, where most of the Dutch and mixed-race Indo children go to school. Indonesian children who speak Dutch also attend the First Government School, as the lessons are taught in Dutch. Next door is the Second Government School, where the same lessons are taught to Indonesian kids in Malay, otherwise known as Bahasa Indonesian.
In his true forward-thinking character, Sjeffie thinks it is about time to find himself a girlfriend. There are two contenders. The first is Ingrid, a pale, serious girl with long black hair and dark, intense eyes, and the other is Dieneke, the blond, wholesome daughter of the local pastor. Ingrid quickly knocks Dieneke out of the running when she tells Sjeffie that she is actually a Russian princess whose parents fled to Indonesia via China to escape the Bolsheviks during the revolution. This may or may not be true, but either way, she’s more interesting than Dieneke to Sjeffie.
When he gets older, Sjeffie sometimes bikes across town with Piet Kreijger, his classmate, to Piet’s home near the sugar plantation. Piet’s father works for the sugar plantation, so they get to live in one of the small wooden bungalows across the street from the giant processing factory where the sugarcane is transformed into crystal, to be stirred into the tea and coffee that originally brought the Dutch to Indonesia four hundred years earlier via the United East India Company. Sjeffie and Piet and the other boys whose parents work for the sugar plantation play hide-and-seek in the tall sugarcane. They break off stalks and chew the sweet ends into a pulp as they crouch down amid the cicada hum, waiting to be found.
Madiun, Indonesia, 2014
Joko pulls over in front of the sugarcane fields at the edge of Madiun, still there after all these years, growing with the seasons as they’ve grown since the seventeenth century, impervious to their boys becoming men, to war, to the papers that indicate who owns or no longer owns them. My father and I walk to the edge of the fields. “When the sugarcane got higher than it is now, it towered over our heads, and nobody could see us. You could get lost inside a sugarcane field,” he says. I think this is the impulse of all young boys around the world, seeking out the spaces beyond reach, building their forts, the places they can hide from the eyes of others. Madiun is a playground to my father in the 1930s. The spaces are open, and there are trees to climb.
My father and I walk toward the former sugar refinery. It is now abandoned, but the old mill is still in the open clearing of the factory, and I take a photo of the massive machine. Seeming to appear from nowhere, two men in uniforms materialize. They wag their fingers, speak sharply to me in Bahasa. I lower my camera. Joko, who has been leaning against his van and smoking, wanders over with a frown on his face and begins to speak with them, becoming increasingly loud. They yell at one another using words I cannot understand. My parents and I hurry to the van and get in. Eventually, Joko storms back to the car, calling things back to the men over his shoulder. We drive on. Joko stares straight ahead without speaking as I take photos of the small cottages where the sugar mill workers lived. I don’t dare to get out of the car again, so I take photos through the open window.
“What did you say to those men back there?” I finally ask Joko, a little afraid of the response.
“I told them they are stupid,” he says angrily. “You are trying to see this part of your father’s home. You just want to take a picture. So stupid, these men.” He waves his hand in their direction, shaking his head with irritation. But I know there is more.
I have been afraid of encountering anti-Dutch attitudes, and everywhere we go, I feel the anxiety of representing the face of hundreds of years of colonial ancestors to an entire population of Indonesians. I don’t know how to negotiate this history that was never my choice, never my father’s choice as someone born into it. While I understand the anger and resentment, I am grateful for the generous attitudes of Indonesians like Joko, who seem to make up the vast majority of the people we meet. To be shut out of one’s nostalgia so deliberately seems terribly sad, though my father says nothing about it. I wonder how much of my sensitivity to this inherent tension is generational, though. I’m not even sure if my father understands the roots of these little conflicts we encounter, if he can inhabit a space where he understands why a totok is sometimes still resented or can feel himself to be an interloper. I am not even sure I want him to, given how he loved this place and how much he’s already lost. He doesn’t have the required emotional distance to take on the recalibration of his own history, the idea that perhaps the people he thought were his friends and neighbors didn’t love his being there the way he loved being there as a little boy. Maybe that’s my job as the next generation.
Joko pulls to the side of the road when my father says, “Piet lived in one of these two houses.” Through the open window, I quickly snap photos of both cottages, the paint flaking off their sides, photos that will be sent to my father’s childhood friend, who has never returned to Indonesia himself.
While Joko navigates us through the streets of Madiun, my father clicks back into his childhood momentarily as we near his old house and he suddenly recalls the route to school on his bicycle. Despite the vast changes to the neighborhood and its concrete makeover, he remembers each turn perfectly, instructing Joko and leaning forward to peer through the windshield excitedly. “Right here. Yes, left at that next cross street. Down this little road.” Memory, even when it has slipped into the darkest corners of the mind, imprints and emerges, unfolding like a map. Each street is seamlessly connected by the senses. We pull up in front of a low pale green building.
“Yes! This is it! The First Government School. It’s the same as it was!” We climb out of the van and walk along the fence in front of the school. Children in uniforms are in the yard. They spot us and wave. “Hello! Hello!” they call, all smiles. A man sitting on a motorbike in the front scowls at us pointedly. The younger generation inside the school are surprised and excited to see our faces in their city, one rarely visited by Western tourists. They clamor at the fence, calling to us in the words they’ve learned from English class. They beckon us in, and we walk to the entrance, where school staff members emerge from the front office with bottles of water for us. They smile and chatter in Bahasa Indonesian while my father, whose Bahasa returns more and more each day, responds with broken sentences. The English teacher is summoned. The whole school is now gathered outside the office, curious students giggling and waving at our odd group. We awkwardly wave back, sipping our water. The principal arrives with the English teacher. It turns out the English teacher doesn’t speak English very well, but we manage to convey that my father went to school here as a young boy, and she translates this to the principal. He shakes my father’s hand vigorously and beckons us to follow him to his office. There, my father is asked to sign a guestbook, and as if by magic, the entire faculty has appeared with cameras. The principal poses in photo after photo, waving away faculty members who want to get into the picture. Only when he has finished do the other faculty members get photos with us. The English teacher brings forward her star pupils, who converse in their best English with us one by one. I am mortified by this attention and make lame jokes to cover my discomfort. My father accepts it graciously, posing with each person. He is taken to his former classroom. He folds his eighty-three-year-old body into the little wooden desk there, grinning at me as the children crowd around him.
Madiun, Dutch East Indies, 1940
The news from the motherland is not good. At the Soce, Sjeffie’s parents huddle with other adults over a card table, drinking jenever. They pause their games of bridge to lean across the table and speak in low tones about the blitzkriegs over Rotterdam, offering their opinions on the Nazi occupation. Surely the Germans will be pushed back by the Allied soldiers from Great Britain and Canada. Surely this kind of inhumanity cannot stand. But the news arrives first as rumor and then officially. After only five days of fighting, the Dutch army surrenders to the Nazis. The queen has vanished, I heard. No, the royal family has fled. Yes, the royal family has fled to London, in fear for their lives. Confirmed. Heard it on the wire. I raise. Can I get another jenever over here? And some peanuts for the table?
Questions swirl for weeks. Was the royal family right to flee? Did they abandon their citizens? Was it the only way to save their lives? Rotterdam is in flames. The charred bodies of nine hundred people bombed in their homes, pulled from the piles of brick, are all that is left of the inner city. Those people didn’t get a chance to flee. Those who have family in Rotterdam worry constantly. Are their loved ones in the rubble? Late at night, the Dutch in the colonies turn the knobs on their radios and hang on the scratchy words of the radio announcers. News comes by boat from loved ones back in the Netherlands, so slowly that their lives may be entirely different lives before their words even reach the Indies. Houses may have fallen in the interim as the letters crossed the sea, doors kicked in, people pulled from their beds in the night. In the thick midafternoon drone of the tropics, with its motionless geckos pressed against the walls to keep their bodies cool, the pregnant hours of silence eat at one’s nerves.
On December 7, 1941, more shocking news comes. Sjeffie sits on the floor of the living room while his parents hunch over the giant wooden radio. The reporter announces that the Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The United States has not been involved in the war to that point, though it has cut off its oil, steel, and iron supply to Japan in an attempt to thwart Japan’s intentions to invade countries in the Pacific. Japan has already run through China with a fury, and has made a pact with Germany and Italy as an Axis power for a “new world order.” The ambush attack on the United States is intended to destroy most of the U.S. naval fleet in the Pacific preemptively so that Japan can carry out its plan to take over Southeast Asia. To this end, at the same time that Japan attacks the United States, it attacks strategic military targets in Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines.
The next day, December 8, the American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, declares war on Japan. A date which will live in infamy. Sjeffie hears the words come through the radio and they send chills through him, though he doesn’t understand what they mean. The gravity of Roosevelt’s voice says it all. Suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan … American ships torpedoed … severe damage. But even before the United States’ own declaration, the Netherlands declares war on Japan, knowing what is coming. They have to gather what little military power they have in the Pacific, and they have to do it fast.
The Dutch East Indies readies itself to fight the Japanese. My grandfather is sent to the military base in Surabaya. As a military doctor, he was issued a gun when he enlisted, but as a physician, he barely knows how to shoot it. All military personnel, regardless of function, are now called back to base for a crash course in combat.
My grandmother does her part as well. She and other women take weekend courses to learn how to drive trucks, climbing up into the cabs in their skirts and heels. They try to ignore the implication of the need for them to take on these nontraditional jobs as their husbands attend emergency combat training. At the Soce, members deposit all of their metal items in a collection box to be melted down for the war effort.
While the adults have a period of adjustment and anticipation, Sjeffie, now ten years old, continues to go to school each day. No doubt the adults shield him and the other children from the fear that seizes them.
By now my grandmother’s sisters, Jo and Ko, have both come to live in the Dutch East Indies. Aunt Jo has adjusted to the Dutch East Indies very well. She has begun a religious school with her friend, an Indonesian woman named Soeretna whom the family knows as “Aunt Soer.” Unlike Ko, Jo doesn’t live close to the family, though the family often spends holidays swimming in the pool near Aunt Jo’s mountain cottage near Sukabumi, a lush area abutting a coffee plantation. In a remarkable stroke of bad timing, Ko has moved from Bolivia with her husband, Jan, just before the war. Jan is immediately drafted and sent to the front lines on Java. My grandmother’s brother still lives in Bolivia, and has sent his eleven-year-old son to live with Aunt Ko and Uncle Jan in Java and get an education in a Dutch school like his cousins, since the war with Germany in the Netherlands has removed the option of his studying there. So Sjeffie’s cousin Kees has joined Sjeffie at the Dutch school in Madiun, arriving just three months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Parents are understandably anxious about sending their children to school during this period of waiting for the other shoe to drop, scanning the skies nervously, startling at every sound of a motor. What will happen to them? How can they protect their children from bombs? Sjeffie and his peers are sent to school with pots, colanders, and soup tureen helmets tied upside down on their heads with ribbons and shoelaces, some brandishing pan handles like horns, a feeble but courageous army against the Japanese. My grandfather, home for the weekend before returning to the base in Surabaya, gives Sjeffie a rare military gas mask, something that fills my father with pride. He wears it to school, blinking at his classmates from inside it like a goldfish in a bowl.
At school, workmen furiously dig three long trenches in front of the building to serve as bomb shelters. The teacher tells the students that they will practice air raid drills as soon as the shelters are completed, lining up and climbing into the trenches. So when the air sirens go off one afternoon, Sjeffie assumes it is their first drill. But as they crouch in the shelter with their pot and pan helmets clanging against one another, the situation becomes clear. The sound is distant but unmistakable: airplanes. It’s not a drill. Sjeffie and his classmates hunker down. The teacher shouts, “Heads down, children! Stay down!” Then the first Japanese bombers fly over them with a swelling, all-encompassing roar that fills every space, their black widow undersides marked with the red dot of the Japanese flag. The children look up as the shadows pass over their faces. The planes strafe the airfield nearby, killing the military fathers of several of Sjeffie’s schoolmates while they crouch beside him in the trench in front of the school, listening to the thundering rage of war and their teacher crying.
It is the end of something, or it is the beginning of something. This is the liminal moment between before and after for these children and my father, who haven’t known to feel fear before now. Their worlds begin to tilt.
For a month, a battle rages between the Allied forces and the Japanese, mainly in Surabaya and naval battles off the coast. My grandfather and Ko’s husband, Jan, are at the front near the base in Surabaya, and the rest of the family waits tensely for updates. My grandmother turns on the radio every night to get the news, transmitted by the Nederlands-Indische Radio Omroep Maatschappij, NIROM (Netherlands-Indies Radio News Agency). They hear about the tremendous battle in the Java Sea, the last line of defense for the Allied forces in holding back the Japanese troops. The Japanese forces have twenty-eight well-equipped ships to the Allies’ fourteen cobbled together from Dutch, U.S., U.K., and Australian navy forces. The British, Australian, and American navies have suffered losses in other battles and are reluctant to call in more forces. The Japanese have jammed the radio frequencies, and because of stormy weather, nighttime air assaults on their ships aren’t possible. The Dutch navy must decide whether to move forward with such a small fleet. They know the Japanese are unbeatable. But to do nothing means an assured invasion of Java. Thousands of Dutch and Indonesian citizens wait on the mainland, bellies knotted with fear, hoping for a miracle as news of the battle reaches them. During my research, I come across an interview with Theo Doorman, son of the Dutch naval commander, Karel Doorman, whose name is still on street signs and memorial plaques in the Netherlands. Theo Doorman recalls his father putting him and his mother on an evacuation plane headed for Australia right before the historic battle.
“Did your father know how bad it was? Did he know he would die?” the interviewer asks.
“Yes. I think he knew he would never see us again,” says the son.
The crackling last words of naval commander Karel Doorman are announced through the radio on February 27, 1942, as my father, whose youthful faith in heroes is strong, listens. Doorman’s words to his men, transmitted as his ship heads out to meet the Japanese fleet, have gone down in Dutch history as some of the most noted because they represent persistence and unwavering bravery even in unwinnable circumstances: “All ships follow me.” They are brave and stupidly perseverant words spoken in the face of terrible odds, words that are repeated in the homes of thousands, including the home of a little boy who desperately wants his home to stay safe and needs a hero.
When my father tells me this story back in the United States, to my shock, he begins to weep, breaking down at Doorman’s famous words, “All ships follow me.” I can count the times I have seen my father cry on one hand. He does not cry while standing in his former concentration camp. He does not cry while describing his friends dying or being beaten by the Japanese soldiers. But my father cannot speak Karel Doorman’s final words without his voice cracking, even after several tellings. It happens again at Thanksgiving dinner as he tells the story to my sister’s husband. He can’t get that sentence out, and clears his throat repeatedly, drinking water and shaking his head. This famous line, which represents absolute commitment and stubborn determination to many, makes my usually stoic father emotional because he has internalized it as part of his character, perhaps as a result of this moment of hope that Doorman provided to a terrified child and nation.
I finally ask my dad, who isn’t comfortable talking about his feelings, why this Karel Doorman story and those last words, “All ships follow me,” make him so emotional. “Doorman was willing to keep fighting for what he believed was right,” he says. “He sacrificed his life to defend us. Same with the soldiers who tried to liberate us and lost their lives in the process. I believe in fighting for what’s right, even if the odds are against you, even if you can’t imagine how you’ll overcome the obstacles. You fight until the death.”
“Do you think Doorman affected your own character?” I ask. “Did you try to be like that yourself in life?”
“Well, yes, I tried. If I believe in something, I believe you keep going. You never give up.”
On a symbolic level, Doorman is who my father forced himself to be for the rest of his life, the spirit animal that got a little boy through the war to adulthood. My father never admits defeat. He won’t admit when things are broken or impossible, ramming square pegs into round holes with remarkable determination. It can be maddening. But when I hear about Doorman, I also understand why my father feels like he has to be that man.
I read the rest of the story about his hero. After seven hours of battle, the Allies lost six of their ships. Admiral Karel Doorman’s ship was struck by a Japanese torpedo and heavily damaged, with many casualties. Heavy fire from Japanese Zeroes prevented any possibility for rescue. Despite being initially uninjured in the attack, Doorman stayed on board with his injured and dying men for the full hour and a half that it took for the vessel to sink, choosing to die beside the other twenty-three hundred men who lost their lives in the battle. A few days later, Japanese troops stormed the beaches on the island of Java.
Java, Dutch East Indies, March 1942
Like ants descending on a dying bird, the soldiers stream out of boats and planes into the cities and villages of Java between February 28 and March 1, 1942. Occupation, invasion. They ride on bicycles, pedaling in formation, row after row, rifles and bayonets angled across their backs, some with guns strapped to the handles of their bicycles like mini turrets. Behind the bicycles are tanks and jeeps and trucks, flowing over the landscape in every direction.
The fighting is furious and bloody, but short-lived. The KNIL (Koninklijk Nederlands Indisch Leger, the Royal Dutch Indies Army) is vastly outnumbered and lacks the weaponry of the Japanese. Back in Madiun, Aunt Ko paces the floor, knowing that her husband, Jan, who has no military experience outside of his few days of training, has been sent to the front to fight. The following day, a message arrives: We regret to inform you. Jan was mowed down in gunfire on the front lines almost immediately as the Japanese came ashore. Ko is inconsolable. Cousin Kees and Sjeffie and his younger siblings watch with wide eyes as she sobs with wild animal sounds into my grandmother’s neck. The immensity of this is almost too much for the children to take in.
Back at the military airfield in Surabaya, the Dutch Indies Army takes heavy fire. My grandfather, as a doctor, is charged with establishing medical relief in the hangar, which has been set up as a makeshift hospital. He hears the fighting from the hangar, where he receives dead and wounded bodies, organizing triage. As he and another doctor watch, a Dutch plane comes in for a landing, and the Japanese Zeroes chase it. The plane, on fire and skidding down the runway, billows smoke as the Japanese fighters pull up and turn to come back for another strafing run. The top of the Dutch plane pops open, and a bleeding airman emerges into the smoke. He climbs clumsily out of the cockpit, falling to the runway below.
The Japanese fighters are now heading back, low. The Dutch pilot tries to get to his feet, but he is injured, and he falls back down. Like a target, he lies there, grasping at the air with his hands. The Zeroes are getting close. My grandfather and the other doctor look at each other. Then they run. Dragging the pilot by the arms, they pull him into the hangar as the bullets hit the tarmac around them and the Japanese fighters turn for a third run, the Dutch plane now completely engulfed in flames. After the war, my grandfather will receive the Bronze Cross for this act.
The Dutch East Indies surrenders ten days later, on March 9. Those left standing hurry home to their families as quickly as they can, before the handover of power to the Japanese forces takes place. Over everyone’s head hangs the question: How will the Japanese govern them?
In Surabaya, my grandfather arrives at the train station, desperate to return to his family. The Japanese have ordered the trains to be halted so they can use them for their troops, and this is the last passenger train to Madiun before the transfer of power. The trip to Madiun takes hours. My grandfather insists he be allowed on board, persisting until they open the doors to him. He arrives in Madiun exhausted but relieved to be able to take his family in his arms. Uncle Jan doesn’t have that option anymore, something they all are aware of as Aunt Ko sobs into my grandfather’s embrace.
In a matter of a few days, like many of their colonial neighbors, the family goes from a life of very little worry, with a nanny and a chef making sure they are clothed and fed each day, to being invaded by hostile forces.
Sjeffie, ten years old, watches from behind glass as the Japanese soldiers move into Madiun on their bicycles. He has been ordered to stay inside by his parents, and is playing in the living room when he sees the soldiers begin to pass the house, their faces stern and unmoving as their legs pump beneath them. He calls out, “Mama! Mama! The Japanese are here! On bicycles! They have guns!” His mother rushes into the room. The windows rattle as a tank follows the soldiers, a Japanese gunner’s head prairie-dogged out of the top.
In the center of Madiun, there are sounds of gunfire. Sjeffie sneaks out onto the road in front of the house, and in the slokan, the gutter running down the side of the road for the monsoon rains, he suddenly sees a number of cans bobbing along. He fishes them out. Soup, beans, condensed milk. In the center, some people have looted the stores in the chaos of invasion. When they saw two Indonesian men hanged by the Japanese troops in a square and realized that people were being searched for stolen goods, they dropped their cans into the gutters, where the rainwater now carries them to Sjeffie. The Japanese army has quickly established order and control. There will be no more resistance.
Meanwhile, Sjeffie’s father rushes to his bedroom, opens his closet, and pulls his military uniform from a hanger. The boy loves seeing his father put on the uniform, with its shiny brass buttons and starched shoulders. He feels proud. His father opens a box on the bureau with a key and takes out his pistol. Sjeffie watches wide-eyed. He’s never seen his father with a gun before. His father puts the gun on the uniform and rolls it all up in a ball. “Papa, what are you doing?” Sjeffie asks. His father stops and sits on the edge of the bed. “Listen carefully. If the Japanese ask, I am not in the military, OK?” The boy nods, his breath stuck in his chest. He follows his father out into the garden. His father walks quickly to the well. He dumps the whole bundle into the hole. There is a pause, then a loud splash that echoes up from the pit. His father turns and goes back to the house. Sjeffie grips the edge of the well and stares down into the black. He cannot see anything. His father’s uniform and gun have vanished into the underworld.
It doesn’t help. The Japanese take over government offices and have access to military records. A few weeks later, a truck rumbles up the driveway and several Japanese soldiers emerge from it. They bang loudly on the door, and then they are taking my grandfather away in a truck to a military prison. Sjeffie watches the truck growing smaller as it moves down the driveway, dust kicking up in its wake. His mother is given orders by the Japanese to vacate the house. The staff are told they no longer have jobs. My grandmother gives them some of the money she has, but the Japanese officers tell the nannies and chauffeur and cook they must move out of the house as well. It’s uncertain where they will go. The djongos, Suwardjo, says he will stay near the family, though he has no work now, no income to support himself. The servants are being displaced too. Days later, Sjeffie and his remaining family, including Aunt Ko and Cousin Kees, move into a small cottage down the road with another Dutch woman and her children, while the Japanese officers are living in Sjeffie’s home, eating at his table, sleeping in his bed. He wonders if they’ve found his secret hiding place in the attic yet, if they’ve discovered the trick to the loose door handle in the bathroom upstairs, if they climb his tree.
Europeans are placed under house arrest by the Japanese. Sjeffie is no longer allowed to go to his beloved school, and in Batavia (known later as Jakarta), the heads of European schools are arrested.
War doesn’t mean just physical control. It means psychological control, and psychological control means the control of communication. Political conversation is banned. The Dutch residents still get some news on the radio from the NIROM station, but this lasts only a short time. On March 8, the day the Dutch surrender, the announcer ends the program with “We now end our broadcasts. Farewell until better times. Long live the queen.” However, for a week thereafter, three defiant radio employees continue sending short broadcasts that end with the “Wilhelmus,” the Dutch national anthem. When the Japanese discover this, they behead the employees, and thereafter, any European caught listening to a radio is executed.
In Bandung, Dutch government officials are executed and their offices taken over by the Japanese. Throughout the country, the official calendar changes overnight from the year 1942 to 2602. Japanese characters replace roman numerals. All newspapers, Dutch and Indonesian, are taken over by the Japanese authorities and begin to churn out propaganda in Bahasa. The newspaper Asia Raya now fills the newsstands, praising the brave and powerful Japanese soldiers fighting against the weak, indecisive Allied forces. Dutch as an official language is banned. The printing or sending of any literature is halted, punishable by death.
By April 1942, the Kempeitai—Japanese military police—have begun to spread into the villages. There are executions for people breaking the rules. All people over seventeen in Java must register, and pay a registration fee, as well as sign a document pledging loyalty to Japan. Europeans are charged exponentially more than the native Indonesian population. The Dutch are told they must pay 150 guilders (valued at around $1,000 in today’s currency) for men, 100 for women, in exchange for “protection” for their cooperation, the implication being that others would possibly come to harm for not paying the fee. The registration is only a means to get the names and addresses of the residents, however, as there is no sign of any unique protection if one pays the registration fee. Ultimately, the police begin making deals with unregistered people so they can register for 1 guilder, just to get their names and addresses down on paper.
Next door to the cottage where my father moves is an abandoned school to which the city tows cars, perfect cars that have been intentionally destroyed and abandoned on the roads by their owners: long white Pierce-Arrows and convertible Willys-Knights with rounded tops and shining leather upholstery. They are ridiculously gorgeous cars. There are photographs of my grandfather sitting in one of these grand autos, like something out of The Great Gatsby. In the days before the Japanese make landfall, when the Battle of the Java Sea is lost, family tjopers watch these fine machines they’ve driven for years retreat down the palm-lined roads, carrying their jobs with them. Then the Dutch men work together to remove the tires, cut the gas lines, and smash the headlights and windshields of their own cars. They know the autos will be confiscated, and they don’t want to give the Japanese any more vehicles with which to wage war. They may be conquered, but they will not aid the Japanese war effort.
Sjeffie and the other kids in the neighborhood sneak into the schoolyard and scavenge any remaining parts of the cars. They open the hoods and discover remnants of gasoline in the glass reservoirs, which they siphon through a bamboo shoot into coffee cans. They decide to make a fire with it, dousing auto upholstery and gathering sticks. They pour the gasoline over the pile, then set it on fire. Still boys, even in war. It explodes into flames, larger and more ferocious than they had anticipated. They turn and run home to their mothers.
The Japanese are perplexed and angered by the behavior of Dutch children like Sjeffie, still playing outside after the invasion. They have strict codes of respect, and these children do not seem to understand this. The Japanese insist that the Europeans should “behave more like conquered people.” A formal decree is drawn up and posted. No more roller-skating, to begin with.
ANNOUNCEMENT 20 APRIL 1942
The mayor of Batavia informs you: Due to complaints received from the Nippon authorities about the annoyance caused by roller-skaters, the mayor of Batavia must forbid any roller-skating traffic in the vicinity of buildings where the Japanese authorities live and on public roads. If there is no halt to the roller-skating traffic, more severe controls will be enforced.
Other rules are printed and distributed as well.
ANNOUNCEMENT
On orders from the Nippon government to all Europeans, It is expected of all European residents that as members of a conquered group, you will show respect to Dai Nippon, especially the Nippon military.
The following rules should be observed:
• Don’t come outside unless you have no other choice.
• Rules must be followed if you do find yourself in public. Specifically, in restaurants, cafes, and other public spaces loudness is not permitted and you may not cause a disturbance.
• Anywhere outside, at any time of day, you must display to Nippon military—regardless of their rank—a display of respect by bowing.
• To avoid severe disciplinary measures, the Nippon authorities expect a strict adherence to above-named rules.
• European women are expected to dress themselves decently. Clothing such as long pants, which is an imitation of men’s clothing, may no longer be worn, given that this is in opposition to Eastern mores.
I find this ban on roller-skating and the Japanese regime’s insistence on respect from the losing side illuminating about the particular harshness of life under Japanese military occupation in the years that follow, because it speaks to an underlying philosophy about roles. Knowing one’s place seems to matter a lot to the occupying forces. The social roles of conquerors and the conquered are self-explanatory and obvious to them, so they are baffled when they encounter a culture where adherence to the rules is not second nature. In this way, the dynamic of an invading force conquering a colonial population that is itself an occupying force and used to being in a power position creates an extra layer of hostility from both sides.
Sjeffie doesn’t live in the cottage very long—two months. Then the Japanese officers come to take the women and children away, like the men before them. Before they arrive, my grandmother gives her most important possessions to the Indonesian Dr. Sajidiman for safekeeping, a foresight that means our family has photographs and films of the family’s life before the war, unlike so many other families who leave everything behind with the naive belief that they’ll be returning to untouched homes after this bit of trouble blows over. My grandmother does keep a few special family photos and her jewelry, sewing it inside her clothing. She brings cans of sugar and coffee too. But most of the family’s belongings must be left behind. Each of them can bring one suitcase with them. Taking a deep breath and hoping she’s taken the right things, she closes the clasps and walks out of the little cottage. The officers have arrived, shouting commands. The women and children, along with hundreds of Dutch people from the region, are taken on flatbed trucks to the train station, where they are loaded onto waiting steam trains.
“I actually thought it was kind of an adventure,” my dad says now about the transport. “There were a lot of families at the train station. We didn’t know where they were going to take us. We had no idea it was going to be bad. But one thing I knew pretty quickly was that I didn’t like the Japs very much.” He always uses the term Japs, the term they all used then, and I always feel uncomfortable because I know this is a slur. But I don’t correct him anymore because he doesn’t stop. I’ve read how the Japanese officers would beat the prisoners if they heard them refer to the officers as the Japs in the camp. Yet people still did it and risked a beating, a small demonstration of defiance and disrespect toward captors who insisted on respect. I know this is stuck in my father’s psyche, this term he uses solely for the Japanese forces that captured him rather than a catchall term for Japanese people. In the camps, it became the internees’ way of fighting back against their own subjugation. I am not sure how possible it would be for me to uncouple the slur “Jap” and the Japanese military forces in his mind, or to insist on political correctness from my father when he is referring to the officers who insisted on his obedience in this regard. “The Japs were already swinging their whips at the train station. I made sure to stay out of their way,” he says.
My father’s train is going to Semarang, in Central Java. They travel all day, watching the lush green rice paddies and banana trees flow past, disappearing behind them. When they arrive in Semarang, they are loaded into trucks that take them from the station to the gates of their new home, which is surrounded by fencing and, in some places, loops of barbed wire. The gates open, and the trucks pass under the arches. Across the top is written “Lampersari.” Camp Lampersari. Outside the camp, guards patrol the perimeter. The gates shut behind the new camp residents and two Japanese officers stand in front of them. The detainees are now officially prisoners of war.